Politics in the age of
austerity: from above or below?
By: Neil Davidson Apr 16 2015
Neil Davidson is the author of The Origins of Scottish Nationhood (2000), Discovering the Scottish Revolution (2003), for which he was awarded the Deutscher Prize, and How Revolutionary Were the Bourgeois Revolutions? (2012). Davidson lectures in Sociology in the School of Political and Social Science at the University of Glasgow, Scotland.
In an article originally published in the Spring 2015 issue of the rs21 magazine discusses the disintegration of social democracy and the impasse of the revolutionary left . Although I have firm differences with his political position and the International Socialists he probes the uncertainties and dilemma of contemporary revolutionary Marxism as well as the demise of social democracy with clarity and deep insight.
In 1976,
Perry Anderson, then editor of New Left Review, noted that a new situation was
emerging in Europe:
For the
great mass Communist Parties of Western Europe—in Italy, in France, in
Spain—are now on the threshold of a historical experience without precedent for
them: the commanding assumption of governmental office within the framework of
bourgeois-democratic states, without the allegiance to a horizon of
‘proletarian dictatorship’ beyond them that was once the touchstone of the
Third International.[1]
The
anticipated breakthrough never occurred. Instead, between 1976 and 1981, it was
the social democratic parties that experienced a final flowering, above all in
those Southern European countries that were either only then emerging from
various forms of dictatorship, like Portugal, Spain and Greece, or where social
democracy had since been previously overshadowed by the local Stalinist
organisation, as in France. Indeed, the French Parti Socialiste government of
1981-1986 may have been the last to attempt a traditional reformist strategy –
and to have been prevented from achieving it in an equally traditional way.[2]
Since then, social democracy has adapted, unevenly and with occasional
backsliding, to the neoliberal order in its ‘social’ variant, a process
initiated not in Western Europe at all, but by Labour Party governments first
in Australia (1983) and then in New Zealand (1984).[3]
Nearly
forty years since Anderson’s original speculations about the possibility of
Communist parties forming or at least entering government, and thirty years
since the last stand of social democracy in its classic form, we face a
situation in which a new range of left parties are contending for office in
Europe. The oldest of these, the Left Party in Germany and the Party of
Communist Refoundation in Italy have, according to Charles Post “reproduced the
social and political contradictions of classical, pre-First World War
socialism”. In particular, Post notes: “Neither party has transcended the
pre-1914 social democratic ‘twin pillars’ organizational norm where the party
focussed on electoral politics and while union officialdom directed the
day-to-day class struggle in the workplace and beyond.”[4] But newer
formations, including the only one so far to have actually formed a government
– Syriza in Greece – are harder to incorporate into this model.
A more
plausible comparison might be with the movements in Latin America, which saw
the election of governments of varying degrees of radicalism from the late
1990s through to the mid-2000s. With the partial exception of Argentina,
however, these took place in states with problems characteristic of that
region, which are quite different from those experienced by even the poorest
countries of Western Europe, above all the oppression of the indigenous
population and the existence of giant peripheral slums inhabited by the under-
or unemployed. In general terms, the centre-left governments of Latin America
have constructed ‘compensatory states’, where rents are collected from
state-owned and multinational firms involved in the extraction of primary
commodities – coal, oil and gas – and redistributed to the poorest sections of
the population; but this uneasy relationship is not a challenge to the
existence of state or private capital.[5] And, as Ashley Lavelle has pointed out
in his obituary for social democracy, the state which has done most to raise
the living standards of the Latin American working-class, Venezuela under Hugo
Chavez, did so on the basis of appropriating oil revenues when the price of
that commodity was high. Even leaving aside the problems that the fall in oil
prices has caused for this strategy, it was never going to be a model for the
revival of the left in Western Europe.[6]
For some
commentators on the revolutionary left, there is a better comparison for the
new parties of the European left, involving a model, one designed “for a left
that has lost whatever confidence it had that a revolutionary party rooted in
the working class is possible”:
On the
one hand, as against a discredited reformism that no longer talks of an
alternative to capitalism, it preserves a commitment to socialist aims and
demands; on the other, it sees this commitment being fulfilled in the creation
of a party that, while supporting and seeking a basis in mass action, sees the
parliamentary framework as the route through which change comes. That, then, is
a way to paint left reformism red. Is there a historical precedent for this?
Actually, there is in the Eurocommunist project of the 1970s. This involved
more than de-Stalinisation. It involved a theoretical shift: a repudiation of
the Soviet model of power as no longer appropriate or operable in ‘democratic’
countries. Socialism was not a matter of ‘overthrowing the state’ but of using
parliamentarism to create a mass force that would stop the state being used to
block social advance.
On the
basis of this analysis we are close to repeating the moment identified by
Anderson in 1976: One descendent of Eurocommunism is Syriza, currently riding
high in the Greek polls [this was written before the Greek election of January
2015 – ND]. Those who espouse the model embracing reform and revolution hold
this party up as the party to follow. But the Eurocommunist road to socialism
proved unable to deliver even modest reforms — and in a situation where the
crisis of capitalism is now much deeper a new improved left reformism will fare
no better.[7]
Syriza’s
effective capitulation to the Troika on 19 February demonstrated that these
parties are not immune to problems of reformism; but this does not mean they
can simply be assimilated to Eurocommunism or social democracy as such. In many
respects they represent new developments, where either – as in the case of
Syriza itself – an existing formation was heavily influenced by the Movements
of the Squares from 2011 or, like Podemos in Spain, one emerged directly out of
these movements. As these connections suggest, unlike Eurocommunism these
parties are on a leftward moving trajectory, are closely related to popular
struggles and contain revolutionaries of various denominations. Furthermore,
they are already displaying variations of internal structure and regime:
although Syriza and Podemos are often spoken about in the same context, the
former remains a coalition in a way that Podemos is not. Comparable formations
are likely to follow – and not necessarily at the nation-state level: the
conditions for something to emerge are clearly present in Scotland, for
example.
What
attitude should revolutionaries take towards these parties and the others which
may follow, given that large numbers of working-class people are increasingly
predisposed to support them? To simply conjugate the verb ‘to betray’ is
obviously tempting (‘they are going to betray you; they are betraying you; they
have betrayed you’); but if revolutionaries are to avoid being emotionally
self-satisfied, but utterly irrelevant, then our response has to involve far
closer attention to the type of strategic alternatives that we can offer,
rather than simply repeating the need for revolution, or counterposing ‘the
streets’ to parliament. It may be worth briefly restating why revolutionary
socialists have argued that their goals can never be achieved by electing
politicians.
The
necessity for revolution was set out very early in the formation of historical
materialism, in the notes that would eventually be published as The German
Ideology. There are two reasons why “the revolution is necessary”, wrote Marx
and Engels, “not only because the ruling class cannot be overthrown in any
other way, but also because the class overthrowing it can only in a revolution
succeed in ridding itself anew of all the muck of ages and become fitted to
found society anew”.[8] In other words, assuming that the goal is indeed
socialism, revolution is not a choice of method, but recognition of a
necessity. This is what led Rosa Luxemburg to make her distinction between
reform and revolution:
A social
transformation and a legislative reform do not differ according to their
duration but according to their content. … That is why people who pronounce
themselves in favour of the method of legislative reform in place and in
contradistinction to the conquest of political power and social
revolution, do not really choose a more tranquil, calmer and slower road to the same goal,
but a different goal. Instead of taking a stand for the establishment
of a new society they take a stand for surface modifications of the old
society.[9]
The
distinction was put in a different way by the American Marxist Hal Draper in a
celebrated essay that distinguished between socialism from above and socialism
from below. Both social democracy and Stalinism are examples of the former:
“What unites the many different forms of Socialism-from-Above is the conception
that socialism (or a reasonable facsimile thereto) must be handed down to the
grateful masses in some form or another, by a ruling elite which is not subject
to their control in fact.” Draper’s point is that the result is not socialism
at all. He contrasts it with “socialism from below”: “The heart of
Socialism-from-below is its view that socialism can only be realised through
the self-emancipation of activised masses ‘from below’ in a struggle to take
charge of their own destiny, as actors (not merely subjects) on the stage of
history.”[10]
The most
important recent developments in this respect have indeed occurred in Latin
America, but not the activities of Chavez, Evo Morales, Rafael Correa or any
other elected leader. Instead, they were in the new forms of collective
organisation that emerged first in Argentina between 2000-1 in the form of the
piqueteros (‘picketers’) and asambleas (‘assemblies’), and then in Bolivia
between 2003-5 in the form of the neighbourhood assemblies and workers’
regional committees, which organised from the vast slum city of El Alto to
blockade La Paz. The emergence of new organisational forms ‘from below’ in
Argentina and Bolivia is of crucial importance for revolutionaries, since they
present, if only in embryo, the possibility of an alternative to the bourgeois
state, not merely the attempt to use it (‘from above’) for the benefit of the
working class and the oppressed. Since 2011 Western Europe has seen massive
gatherings and demonstrations, and – in Scotland at least – unprecedented
levels of electoral participation; but not yet comparable forms of collective
organisation. Revolutionaries clearly have a duty to help develop these forms
when they appear, but they are not in our gift to magic them into existence –
indeed, if our belief in the creativity of the working class has any validity
we should expect them to emerge and take unexpected forms: the important thing
is to recognise them when they do.
Most
critics of ‘socialism from below’ are socialists are driven by a desire to
defend one or other of the remaining state capitalist regimes – which for
obvious reasons tends to be Cuba rather than, for example, North Korea – on the
grounds, not merely of the supposed benefits that they bring to the working
class, but because of the impossibility of a pure revolution from below:
What
experience has shown, however, is that the pure form of such a state has proven
to not yet be possible in any country where a successful anti-capitalist
revolution has taken place, nor is it easy to anticipate a successful
revolution where a pure form of this state would be possible under current
circumstances. The only case where it is likely that the form of the state
after a successful revolution is going to be one of a “pure” Paris Commune or
Soviet type is that of nearly simultaneous revolutions in the main imperialist
centres.[11]
There is
an element of truth in this: “whoever expects a pure revolution will never live
to see it” as Lenin famously argued. The socialist revolution is likely to be a
prolonged process – not merely on a global scale, but within individual
countries. At some point, in that process, each state will have to be
destroyed, but before that moment is reached, revolutionaries may likely find
themselves, perhaps in alliance with others, attempting to use the existing bourgeois
state apparatus to introduce ‘reforms’ which will strengthen the position of
the working class. What should they do in these circumstances?
I will
return to this question, but first we need to consider why social democracy as
it is currently constituted will be unlikely to play a role.
Even
leaving aside future revolutionary developments, the main reason why these new
formations have already acquired such significance is the decline of Social
Democracy. Gregory Elliot argues that it evolved over three distinct periods:
1889-1945, 1945-1975, and 1975-the present.[12] As a movement, it has always
been fundamentally supportive of capitalism in practice, but during the first
period it was at least committed in rhetorical terms to abolishing it. In particular,
from the split in the Second International and the Russian Revolution onwards,
it was able to present an explicit reformist strategy for achieving socialism,
as opposed to the revolutionary one advocated by the Communist Parties: using
the bourgeois state rather than destroying it.
The
second period coincided with the post-war boom and allowed the possibility of
positive reforms for the working class without the need to transform the
system, although these were also delivered by forces to the right of social
democracy. During this period at least some ‘revisionist’ discussions argued
that the system had already been self-transformed by Keynesianism and the
Welfare State into something that no longer deserved the name of capitalism.
The
crisis of the 1970s destroyed these illusions and saw the onset of the third
period: once the possibility of reform seemed to be removed by the imposition
of neoliberalism, all that remained, for the leaderships at any rate, was the
commitment to capitalism and some residual rhetoric: do whatever was necessary
to save capitalism, then we could maybe think about further reforms. Central to
this process was the crisis of Keynesianism. In ideological terms, the collapse
of the Stalinist regimes did not so much ‘prove’ as confirm the already widely
held belief that any alternative form of economy to neoliberal capitalism was
impossible. As Alan Sinfield has pointed out, by 1989, virtually no-one,
especially not on the post-1968 revolutionary left, regarded the Stalinist
regimes as ‘a model for socialism’. The real ideological shock, although one
which was more slow-acting, had been the earlier revelation that Keynesianism
and the Welfare State in its post-1945 form was incompatible with capitalism,
at least as anything other than a short-term expedient.[13]
These
periods embody tendencies: it is possible to find each of the dominant
attitudes in periods before or after the periods with which they became
associated. In particular, the left-wing of Social Democracy tended to be one
step behind its overall trajectory: after 1945 they still argued for a
reformist transformation of society, rather than merely for reforms; after 1975
– in the UK this occurred after the collapse of Bennism in the early 1980s –
they still argued for reforms rather than for repairing capitalism.
Behind
these ideological shifts, were changes in structure that acted to make the
shift to the right permanent. Until very recently, revolutionaries tended to
argue that working-class people should vote for social democracy in elections.
The main reason held that the most politically advanced workers regarded the
social democratic parties as different from the capitalist (or openly
capitalist) parties and revolutionaries had to ‘stand alongside’ these workers
in when elections took place, partly to show class solidarity, partly because,
when the Labour (or whichever) Party inevitably betrayed worker’s hopes, it
would be ‘exposed’ (“crucified on the cross of office”) and that this would
lead voters to turn to the revolutionaries instead. Unfortunately, examples of
this actually happening in the short-term, other than in the case of
individuals, are virtually non-existent. There has been a cumulative,
decades-long process of disillusionment with social democracy, but this is
reflective of far greater shifts in capitalist society, not this or that
‘betrayal’, shifts which have seen precisely those characteristics which
workers used to recognise as making social democracy different from other
parliamentary parties fade. Using the Labour Party as an example – although in
some respects it is quite dissimilar to the majority of social democratic
parties – there seem to be three of these characteristics, all of which have
been eroded during the neoliberal era.
The first
is working-class membership. Originally, the membership of the Labour Party was
predominantly working class, although it also had a strong component of the
professional middle classes, typified by the Webbs, Attlee, Gaitskell, etc. It
was this actual class basis that led Lenin to describe it as a “capitalist
worker’s party”, consisting mainly of workers, but acting in the interests of
the bourgeoisie. (Although it is worth noting that the Tory Party also had
strong individual working class membership down to the 1950s – in Glasgow
particularly, but also in Liverpool and other areas across the UK especially
with strong Orange/Loyalist connections.) This class base has been declining
since the 1960s, and especially since the mid-1980s, to the point where the
individual membership is dominated by members of the new middle class. Most of
Labour’s working class membership now comes from the affiliated trades unions,
whose role is therefore decisively important.
The
second – and usually the only one that is cited – is therefore a structural
link to the organised working class. The affiliated trades unions and, more
distantly, the TUC, STUC, etc., acted as channels for expressing organised
working class views within the Labour Party. Although always heavily mediated
through the bureaucracy, these views did influence Labour policy, a process
which reached its peak around 1974. In theory, this could still take place, but
in practice the bureaucracy have exercised a self-denying ordinance since the
advent of New Labour that has led to the marginalisation of working class
influence over the party. There is no doubt that in purely financial terms
Labour would effectively cease to exist without the money it receives from the
unions, now that its corporate sponsors have deserted it. It is, however,
difficult to identify many policies which the unions have received in return:
the minimum wage certainly, Gordon Brown’s covert increase in public sector
jobs perhaps, but beyond these? In fact, the main fruits of the trade union
link are mainly in the other direction: TU officials holding back struggle on
the grounds that it will endanger Labour’s chances of re-election, even though,
once re-elected Labour promise nothing but the same policies as the Tories in
slow motion. It is no accident, as we say, that the unions that are the most
politically radical – PCS, UCU – are not affiliated to Labour, and the rank and
file tend to regard it with undisguised hostility.
The third
is the promulgation of policies which are specifically designed to improve the
condition of the working class (‘reforms’) rather than ‘the people’ or ‘the
nation’ in general. Labour, historically, has a number of important
achievements to its credit. We tend to be quite dismissive of these (as indeed was
Miliband Senior), concentrating instead – for obvious and usually entirely
justified reasons – on the record of Labour betrayal. The trouble with this
approach is that it makes it difficult to explain why anyone ever believed in
the Labour Party in the first place. But these achievements are all in the past
– in some cases the very distant past. Increasingly, voting Labour on the basis
that it will make any practical difference is more of a historical memory than
a contemporary reality. And this is not just about programmes like Wheatley’s
council house building in the 1920s, institutions like the NHS, or legislation
like Equal Pay Act. There used to be a layer of Labour activists in most
working-class communities – often quite right-wing activists – who would lobby
the council, organise petitions, and generally act as focus for local community
reformism. This layer is greatly diminished. These activities still get done,
but it is no longer Labour members who initiate them as a matter of course.
Like
similar organisations in Europe and Australasia, Labour has moved
extraordinarily far to the right. Nevertheless, for what it’s worth, it will
remain a social democratic party so long as it retains the link with the trade
unions, which holds open the possibility of working class demands – in however
bureaucratised a form – once again influencing what it actually does. Since
reformism remains the dominant form of consciousness within the working class,
it may appear that nothing much has changed and that this reformism will
continue to find expression in the Labour Party, as it has for the last hundred
years or so. But there is no necessary connection between reformism in general
and the specific form taken by Labourism. A combination of Labour’s own
behaviour in office and opposition – above all its acceptance of neoliberalism
– together with structural changes in the nature of the working class and the
current diminution of trade union consciousness, means that for many working
class people, Labour does not appear to be fundamentally different from the
other parties but is simply ‘the least worst’ of the choices on offer.
In these
circumstances, if new parties appear, offering reforms, sounding as if they
actually believe in them, and invoking the social democratic tradition, it is
no mystery why working-class voters would support them: the changed fortunes of
PASOK and Syriza in Greece are only the most extreme example of how this can
occur to date. But although their formation and structures may be quite unlike those
of social democracy their political, strategies may not be that different –
they merely hark back to an earlier phase in its history. The current Greek
Finance Minister, Yanis Varoufakis, for example, argued that the key goal for
socialists, even Marxists, was ‘to arrest the freefall of European capitalism
in order to buy the time we need to formulate its alternative’ – precisely the
attitude which has frozen his party in the headlights of the Troika:
…with
Europe’s elites deep in denial and disarray, the left must admit that we are
just not ready to plug the chasm that a collapse of European capitalism would
open up with a functioning socialist system. Our task should then be twofold.
First, to put forward an analysis of the current state of play that non-Marxist,
well meaning Europeans who have been lured by the sirens of neoliberalism, find
insightful. Second, to follow this sound analysis up with proposals for
stabilising Europe – for ending the downward spiral that, in the end,
reinforces only the bigots.[14]
It is not
always the case that parties of the radical left will fill the void: the
Scottish National Party is not in the slightest like Syriza or Podemos in terms
of its structures or politics, but it has grown for similar reasons at the
Labour Party’s expense. The question – which has of course a wider application
than Scotland – is whether the revolutionary left should involve itself in
establishing a party that does resemble Syriza or Podemos in the sense of
bringing together both revolutionary and reformist currents, and, if so, would
it be possible to do so on a basis that did not merely set up a new set of
reformist illusions. The question would be irrelevant if revolutionary
party-building was sweeping all before it, but it is not.
For, unfortunately,
it is not only reformist parties which have entered crisis: so too have those
of the revolutionary left. By this I mean that nowhere has a revolutionary
party, conceived on broadly Leninist lines, been able to grow, for any length
of time, beyond a membership of the single-figure thousands. Why not?
One
reason could be that the entire aim of building the revolutionary party was
delusional: the working class will simply never attain revolutionary class
consciousness, at least in sufficient numbers, to make the project viable. At
best, revolutionaries can act as a pressure group, pushing reformists in the
trade union movement and the social democratic parties further to the left than
they would otherwise be prepared to go by standing fast to the ultimate, but
unobtainable goal of total social transformation. At the time of his departure
from the International Socialists in 1968, Alasdair MacIntyre invoked what he
called the “law of diminishing socialist returns” whereby every political
formation inevitably behaves further to the right than their formal political
position would suggest. As a result, although “those with a revolutionary
perspective” were unlikely to make a revolution, only they “are likely to
promote genuine left wing reforms”.[15] If socialism was genuinely impossible,
was just the ‘utopia’ that Trotsky was prepared to contemplate in the last
months of his life, such a role would of course, still be essential.[16]
I, and I
suspect most readers of this, do not accept this argument, although it is
important to understand that many people on the left who do not believe in the
possibility of a complete socialist transformation of society regard
revolutionary groups as essential precisely because they play the role outlined
by MacIntyre: this is why they are prepared to work with us. The experiences of
the twentieth century surely put paid to any notion of the inevitability of
socialism. Consequently, we do not and cannot know that working class will
ultimately be triumphant – that is the ‘wager’ on revolution which many Marxist
thinkers have invoked; but we still have good reasons to believe that it is
possible and that our actions will be important in helping to bring that
possibility about.[17] We should not succumb to despair.
But neither
should we embrace an unwarranted triumphalism. It could be argued that a more
plausible reason for the universal failure to build mass revolutionary parties
is not working-class incapacity but that revolutionaries have faced a series of
temporarily insurmountable objective conditions – not such as to make
exponential growth an impossible goal, but to hold it within certain limits.
There is obviously some truth in this. It was impossible to build revolutionary
parties in the post-war boom, under conditions of which combined relative
prosperity and the joint stranglehold of social democracy and Stalinism over
working-class politics. With membership numbered in tens (as it was for the
Socialist Review Group in the early 1950s), there was no alternative to what
Trotsky once called “the primitive accumulation of cadres”. But from 1968,
these conditions no longer pertained to anything like the same extent. The
period beginning around 1975 (‘the downturn’) once again made growth
extraordinarily difficult for the revolutionary left, but to argue that this
can explain failure to build anywhere over the subsequent forty years is
stretching credulity to breaking point: it is effectively to say that
revolutionary parties can only be built in excellent conditions – in effect, in
revolutionary conditions, but the entire case for revolutionary organisation
from the German Revolution of 1918-19 onwards is that it has to be built before
a revolutionary situation arises.
But the
only genuinely mass revolutionary parties – those of the Communist
International in its revolutionary period – were never been built by recruiting
ones and twos in this way. There are four actual or potential mechanisms –
which can also be combined: 1) merger with several organisations of a comparable
size; 2) an influx of members following secession from a mass reformist
organisations; 3) affiliation by militants organised in a trans-union rank and
file organisation; or 4) collective adherence by elements of a campaign or
social movement. None of these are likely to arise without a generalised move
to the left. None will leave the host organisation unaffected, so that
exponential growth almost invariably means the original revolutionary party
acts as the nucleus of a new formation, rather than simply undergoes
quantitative growth: the Communist Party of Britain (CPGB) was not simply an
enlarged British Socialist Party; the Communist Party of Germany (KPD) was not
merely an expanded Spartacus League. The route the most relevant to
revolutionaries in the UK in recent years has been that involving a campaign or
social movement, although never to the stage where mass membership was prepared
to transfer directly to a revolutionary party without passage through an
intermediate political formation.
In short,
‘building the party’ in the way that has been understood in the IS tradition
has failed – and of all the post-Trotsky traditions its superior politics to
the other traditions meant that it had the best chance of success. Unless it is
seriously being proposed that we simply carry on doing the same thing and
expect – in line with Einstein’s famous definition of madness – to achieve a
different result, we have to find a new approach.
What
conclusions can we draw from these developments – the disintegration of social
democracy and the impasse of the revolutionary left? First, although the
specific forms of social democracy are in an advanced state of collapse,
reformism is not disappearing, nor will it: it is a form of consciousness
produced by the contradictions of capitalism and one which will ultimately seek
organisational expression, even if these expressions do not take the form
previously taken by organisations such as the Labour Party.
Second,
although the distinctions between reformism and revolution are still valid,
widespread working class understanding of these distinctions has perhaps never
been less clear. New activists may describe themselves as ‘on the left’ or even
as ‘socialists’, but any finer distinctions have simply been lost; and this is
an aspect of a deeper ideological and theoretical vacuum. Back in the early
1970s, Duncan Hallas wrote:
A new
generation of capable and energetic workers exists but they are no longer part
of a cohesive movement and they no longer work in a milieu where basic Marxist
ideas are widespread. We are back at our starting point. Not only has the
vanguard, in the real sense of a considerable layer of organised revolutionary
workers and intellectuals, been destroyed. So too has the environment, the
tradition, that gave it influence. In Britain that tradition was never so
extensive and influential as in Germany or France but it was real enough in the
early years of the Communist Party.[18]
That
judgement was exaggerated then, but Hallas’s words are certainly apt to describe
the current situation. People need to find out whether they are reformists,
revolutionaries – or even vacillating centrists; it will take the combination
of participation in struggle and prolonged argument to clarify matters.
Third,
and more positively, because neoliberalism has moved ‘official’ politics so far
to the right, many issues that in the era of the long boom would have been
considered ‘reformist’ demands, or even elementary issues of human decency, are
now resisted by the dominant institutions of capitalist society. The attitude
of the Troika to the Greek arguments for the end of austerity has provided a
striking demonstration of this. It is not merely that we need to fight for
reforms in a revolutionary way, although that is still the case, it is that the
reforms themselves have the potential to constitute revolutionary demands in a
context where the system is unable to allow them, for fear of interrupting the
restoration of profitability.
The
difficulty is that working classes can respond to austerity by oscillating
between explosions of anger taking the form of demonstrations and occupations
(‘from below’), and simply relying on elected politicians to deliver for them
(’from above’) without there being any relationship between the two, let alone
control of the latter by the former. The recent experience of the independence
referendum in Scotland shows both processes: a massive level of mobilisation
and local creativity, often involving people who had never been politically
active before; then, without any institutional means of holding and channelling
the energies released by the Yes campaign, much of it went in to membership of
or support for the SNP. Not all though, and many people radicalised by the
campaign are rightly suspicious of the SNP and now seek a political home.
Serious revolutionaries should aim to provide them with one – not by offering
their own organisations as ‘the’ revolutionary party, or by creating incoherent
and momentary electoral lash-ups, but rather by establishing a broad socialist
party, with a clearly defined revolutionary current, through which strategies
can be tested and the necessary debates conducted.
The
Scottish Left Project seems to be the best means for working towards this goal
in Scotland itself, but this approach cannot be easily generalised. One of the
effects of neoliberalism in its austerity phase has been to heighten the
unevenness and increase fragmentation of political life internationally:
revolutionaries have to argue for revolutionary politics, but the means, the
forms through which they will have do so can no longer be assumed to have been
settled in advance.
[1] Perry
Anderson, ‘The Antinomies of Antonio Gramsci’, New Left Review I/100 (November
1976-January 1977), 6. http://newleftreview.org/I/100/perry-anderson-the-antinomies-of-antonio-gramsci
[2]
Donald Sassoon, One Hundred Years of Socialism: the West European Left in the
Twentieth Century (London: HarperCollins, 1997) 534-571, 592-644.
[3] For
the differences between ‘vanguard’ and ‘social’ neoliberalism, which can be
summed up as being those between Thatcher and Reagan on the one hand, and
Clinton and Blair on the other, see Neil Davidson, ‘What is Neoliberalism?’ in
Neoliberal Scotland: Class and Society in a Stateless Nation, edited by Neil
Davidson, Patricia McCafferty and David Miller (Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars
Press, 2010), 31-54 and ‘The Neoliberal Era in Britain: Historical Developments
and Current Perspectives’, International Socialism, second series, 139 (Summer
2013), 182-198. http://isj.org.uk/index.php4?id=908&issue=139
[4]
Charles Post, ‘What is Left of Leninism? New European Left Parties in
Historical Perspective’, The Socialist Register 2013: the Question of Strategy,
edited by Leo Panitch, Greg Alba and Vivek Chibber (Pontypool: Merlin Press,
2012), 191.
[5]
Jeffrey R. Webber, ‘Crisis and Class, Advance and Retreat: the Political
Economy of the New Latin American Left’, in Polarising Development:
Alternatives to Neoliberalism and the Crisis, edited by Lucia Pradella and
Thomas Marois (London: Pluto Press, 2015), 161-164. Webber draws the concept of
the ‘compensatory state from the as yet untranslated work of the Uruguayan
economist Eduardo Gudynas.
[6]
Ashley Lavelle, The Death of Social Democracy: Political consequences in the
21st Century (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2008), 16-17.
[7] Kevin
Orr and Gareth Jenkins, “The Case of the Disappearing Lenin”, International
Socialism, second series, 144 (Autumn 2014), 61-61. http://isj.org.uk/index.php4?id=1008
[8] Karl
Marx and Frederick Engels [1845–46], The German Ideology: Critique of Modern
German Philosophy According to Its Representatives Feuerbach, B. Bauer and
Stirner, and of German Socialism According to Its Various Prophets, in
Collected Works, vol. 5 (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1975), 52–53. https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/download/Marx_The_German_Ideology.pdf
[9] Rosa
Luxemburg (1899), ‘Reform or Revolution’, in Rosa Luxemburg Speaks, edited by
Mary-Alice Waters (New York: Pathfinder Press, 1970), 77-78. https://www.marxists.org/archive/luxemburg/1900/reform-revolution/ch08.htm
[10] Hal
Draper [1966], ‘The Two Souls of Socialism’, in Socialism from Below, edited by
Ernest Haberkern (New Jersey: Humanities Press, 1992), 3. https://www.marxists.org/archive/draper/1966/twosouls/0-2souls.htm
[11]
Joaquín Bustelo [2005], “On the Two Souls of Socialism”, The North Star (22
March, 2013). http://www.thenorthstar.info/?p=8036
[12]
Gregory Elliot, Labourism and the English Genius the Strange Death of Labour
England? (London: Verso, 1993), 1-17.
[13] Alan
Sinfield [1997], ‘The Politics and Cultures of Discord’, in Literature,
Politics and Culture in Postwar Britain (Third edition, London: Continuum,
2004), xxx-xxxiv.
[14]
Yanis Varoufakis, ‘How I became an Erratic Marxist’, The Guardian (18 February
2015). http://www.theguardian.com/news/2015/feb/18/yanis-varoufakis-how-i-became-an-erratic-marxist These conclusions should not have come as any
surprise to anyone familiar with the arguments Varoufakis had used as an
academic, shortly before becoming a politician, which involved solving the
global crisis through the ‘the formation of a national coalition of emerging
countries’ or ‘for the West to have an epiphany and, at long last, embrace John
Maynard Keynes’ suggestion of an International Currency Union’. Admittedly,
even he regarded the possibility of the latter happening as ‘far-fetched’. See
The Global Minotaur: America, the True Origins of the Financial Crisis and
Future of the World Economy (London: Zed Books, 2011), 227.
[15]
Alasdair MacIntyre, ‘In Place of Harold Wilson?’, Alasdair MacIntyre’s
Engagement with Marxism: Selected Writings, 1953-1974, edited by Paul
Blackledge and Neil Davidson (Leiden: Brill, 2008), 371.
[16] Leon
Trotsky [1939], ‘The USSR in War’, In Defence of Marxism (Against the Petty
Bourgeois Opposition) (London: New Park, 1971), 11.
[17]
James Connolly [1915], ‘The Re-conquest of Ireland’, Collected Works, vol. 1
(Dublin: New Books 1987), 263; Antonio Gramsci [1929-1935], ‘Problems of
Marxism’, Selections from the Prison Notebooks of Antonio Gramsci, introduced
and edited by Quintin Hoare and Geoffrey Nowell Smith (London: Lawrence and
Wishart, 1971), 438; Lucien Goldmann, The Hidden God: a Study of the Tragic
Vision in the Pensees of Pascal and the Tragedies of Racine (London: Routledge,
1964), 90; Alasdair MacIntyre [1964], ‘Pascal and Marx: on Lucien Goldmann’s
Hidden God’, Alasdair MacIntyre’s Engagement with Marxism, 314; Michael Lowy,
Fire Alarm: on Reading Walter Benjamin’s ‘On the Concept of History’ (London,
Verso, 2005), 114.
[18]
Duncan Hallas, ‘The Way Forward’, in World Crisis: Essays in Revolutionary
Socialism, edited by Nigel Harris and John Palmer (London: Hutchison, 1971),
259.
=========================================
Neil Davidson teaches at the University of
Strathclyde in Glasgow and is the author of The Origins of Scottish
Nationhood, the Deutscher Prize winner Discovering the Scottish
Revolution, and How Revolutionary Were the Bourgeois Revolutions
(Haymarket Books 2012).
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